Evaluation and innovation: An antagonistic pair?

Abstract

Picking up on Olof Hallonsten’s contention that contemporary science evaluation is ‘mostly counterproductive’, we argue that the contemporary focus on evaluation is antagonistic to innovation or novelty in science, even though innovation is one of the values that evaluation is often supposed to support. In arguing for the antagonistic relation between evaluation and innovation, we consider arguments from the nature of audit and the situational logic of scientific practice.